OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Fatherhood is not fungible.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Sure, if you like losing to us.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Yes, I'd agree with this. There is definitely a strain of Australian populism, especially combined with resentment of the Canberra bubble. Palmer is, I would say, pretty incompetent, but Katter and Lambie have made very good runs at it and carved out niches for themselves. To an extent some of the other rising independents of the last decade or so also show the possibilities of political entrepreneurship - Nick Xenophon, more recently the Teals, and so on.
The wider context for all of this, which I imagine would be familiar to anyone in the US or UK, is the continuing decline of the major parties. It's been a relatively smooth decline without major shocks (there was no Australian Trump or Australian Brexit; the closest equivalent is the failure of the Voice, but even that was just preventing something, not actually changing the established order), and preferential voting has maintained the appearance of business as usual, but you can definitely see the yearning for something other than the current two-party system. Both Labor and Coalition primary votes have been steadily declining.
Unfortunately no minor parties seem to have really picked up the slack. The Greens have periodically had ambitions of eclipsing or even outright replacing Labor, but they seem to have hit a ceiling. There just aren't that many yuppies and they struggle to grow past that. One Nation is ramshackle and tends to shoot itself in the foot. We haven't seen any unified alternatives to the major parties. Instead it's just been more and more fragmentation, to independents and to doomed micro-parties like Trumpet of Patriots or Australia's Voice, while the major parties keep winning on preferences.
That can't last forever. Eventually either the major parties pivot towards what the electorate actually wants - Dutton's experiments with populism seem like an attempt to try this - or eventually someone gets their act together enough to overcome one of them. I think, barring some massive exchange in external circumstances that shifts the landscape, the former is more likely than the latter, but we'll see.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
You mean in John 4? I don't see where that passage implies female inferiority? He asks the woman for a drink of water, and the text immediately indicates that he's asking her because the (male) disciples have gone into town to buy food, so it seems like he's comfortable asking people of either sex for nourishment. The woman's response does not mention sex either - she's surprised because he's a Jew and she's a Samaritan. The operative categories are ethnoreligious, not sex.
There is a subsequent discussion of the woman's husband, but again I don't see anything that implies that he considers her the inferior of men?
If I were looking for a gotcha passage showing Jesus giving priority to men or being demeaning of women, I feel like I could do better.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'm sorry, this is a dumb joke, but I can't help it.
"Abolish education and science? That would be the end of civilisation as we know it!"
"We're only abolishing the department. Education and science will flourish."
"Without a government department? Impossible!"
I realise this may not apply to the American Department of Education, which for all I know does a lot more than just provide funding, but sometimes you've got to reach for the low-hanging fruit.
I don't actually think it's a good fit for the Australian Red tribe equivalent, for two reasons.
Firstly, Trumpism relies a lot on charismatic authority and trust in the leader. Americans have a lot more reverence for leaders and especially for businessmen than Australians do. Tall poppy syndrome is still a very powerful force in Australian culture, which means that a Trump-style campaign would not work. There's a reason why, despite its success in both the US and the UK, the Australian series of The Apprentice failed to attract an audience. (Meanwhile The Celebrity Apprentice did well over here, but that's okay because it's all about making celebrities look like an idiots, and if there's one thing Australians love, it is bringing people who think they're better than everyone else back down to earth.) This can be a subtle thing, but in general we just don't feel good about people who put themselves forward like that. Trump-style braggadocio would fail in Australia. If you'd like an example, businessman Clive Palmer has been trying to run Trump-style campaigns here and has mostly failed. Trumpet of Patriots is very blatantly trying to run the Trump strategy here and it is not working. The language is totally alien to Australians, especially the kind of working class or regional voters they need to swing.
Secondly, I think the Trump base is characterised by a kind of defiance or rebelliousness that does not exist in Australia, at least not in the same way. For all that Australians typically dislike authority, and especially proud people, we also tend to be compliant or obedient in a way that Americans are not. The default Australian posture is to grumble about the idiots and bastards in charge and then follow all their instructions faithfully anyway. (You'll notice this in e.g. Australian war drama, where common themes are firstly that our British officers are all a bunch of morons with their heads up their arses who don't know what they're doing, and secondly that nonetheless we are faithful and dutiful and do everything we ought to. We complain, but we obey.) You'll notice this if you look at the covid lockdowns, for instance - Australia had some of the longest lockdowns on the planet, but we also had relatively few protests. There were a couple, but they were few and small especially if compared to those seen in the US. Australians may not like popular authority, but we also tend to view it as legitimate. I trace a lot of this back to the early experience of colonisation - convicts ruled by appointed officers and governors. A prison is a context where you resent the people in charge, and you may be quietly insubordinate where you can get away with it, but you mostly obey orders. While only the very first generation of colonists were convicts and free settlers came to outnumber them very rapidly, I think the political structure of a penal colony influenced the Australian mindset in formative ways.
Anyway, long story short I do not think Trumpism would work in Australia. You would need to find a way of advocating for similar ideas that nonetheless resonates with the Australian psychology.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
My experience has been that outside the small group of professionals and academics who live on the politics of deference, most people don't notice and don't care. I work in a role where I give weekly talks, and the organisation officially prefers an acknowledgement of country before every talk. I mouthed my way through them for the first couple of months, but then gave up, as nobody reacted or seemed to notice. I have since not done an acknowledgement for around a year and not once has anybody even mentioned their absence to me, much less complained. Likewise one of my managers once had a few compulsory seminars about reconciliation within the organisation, brought that to a team meeting, I offered to help (because I have had much more training with this nonsense), and I never heard a peep from her again, nor was any other thing actually done on the ground. The most we do in practice is put up posters and things during NAIDOC Week and similar events, but there is at least a 50% chance that when that happens, people will put up the Aboriginal flag upside down. (In their defence, it is really tempting because the Australian Aboriginal flag's correct orientation looks wrong. Intuitively you want the black on the bottom.) My workplace is heavily Asian so it may not be entirely representative - in my experience Asian migrants generally don't give a damn about Aboriginal people - but I would be shocked if it's completely off-base.
I think that the situation is basically:
A small group of intellectual and media elites like Aboriginal representation, deference, welcomes to country, and so on.
Elite or aspirational white Australians generally defer to this. They imitate the behaviour of the most prestigious class, the media, and so on. They will generally go along with or support any or all symbolic statements, but will get cold feet whenever it might affect their hip pockets.
Lower-middle and lower class white Australians generally find this all pointless, or they actively resent it. They will usually not sign on with it, though they will sit quietly in the back of a compulsory work meeting and zone out if need be.
Non-white non-Aboriginal Australians generally either do not understand these issues, or just don't care about them one way or the other. "What does this have to do with us?" is a common refrain. That said they won't get involved or do anything either - they seem to largely accept it as some weird thing that white Australians do.
Aboriginals themselves... genuinely poor Aboriginals either don't notice or don't care, because they have more pressing issues, but will be willing to do a smoking ceremony or a welcome dance if the whitefellas ask for it. Middle class or aspiring Aboriginals are more likely to see that they can benefit from the politics of deference. I think most see it as white hypocrisy, but it's generally not advantageous to point that out, so only a few do that. But pushing the politics of dfference can be a path to individual or career success, so some do use that.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I would like to apologise for my people's barbarism.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Certainly that represents my hopes.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Nothing whatsoever in Genesis 1 says or even implies that women exist for the benefit of men.
I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man? I'd argue that it's quite a tendentious and implausible reading of that verse to simply interpret it as suggesting female inferiority or servitude, but at any rate, it is not in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 only mentions gender once, in 1:27 ("male and female he created them"), and that verse does not suggest any superiority or inferiority.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?
I think they are doing most of those things, and I commend them for it. My top-level post here was in fact about a conservative Christian attempting to both issue a call to reform and repentance to MAGA and warn Christians away from being influenced by MAGA.
Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.
I'm not sure I'm arguing for a broadside, or for any kind of concerted political campaign. I'd hold that Christians ought to, where possible, speak the truth and call people to better behaviour. That may take a different form when it is issued to other Christians as when it is issued to secular society (and Christians should of course try to improve secular society), but either way I don't see a valid argument for Christian quietism.
It is, incidentally, worth noting that Trump himself claims to be a Christian, and Elon Musk, though stopping short of saying he's a Christian himself, identifies as a 'cultural Christian' and says that he's 'actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity'. For Christians to issue a call for Trump and Musk to live out Christian values more fully is not actually a call to pagans in the first place. Trump claims to be inside the tent; Musk has at least one foot in. So Christians asking Trump or Musk to behave in more Christian ways is by no means "policing non-Christians".
OliveTapenade
9d ago
It does not seem Christian, to me, to excuse or justify what is evil? What you've said reminds me of the "we need our own Putin" argument from conservative Christians circa 2016 (criticised here). The last I checked Christians were not supposed to act out of fear. When Musk or Trump behave badly, it seems entirely appropriate, to me, for Christians to say that behaviour is bad and to issue a call to repentance.
Christians are supposed to be signs of contradiction to the world. As that blogger says, "the idea that we should keep our mouths shut instead of "dividing"... is an insidious falsehood that is totally off the mark".
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I'm sympathetic to your point here, and certainly deeds tell more than words, cf. Matthew 7:21-23. However, I would be concerned that defining Christianity exclusively in terms of love is too broad. The category 'Christians' doesn't just mean everybody who loves, or everybody who loves the concept of love. That's a criterion that would capture many atheists, as well as practitioners of any number of non-Christian religions. I (though a Christian myself), find, for instance, Santideva to be one of the most eloquent religious exponents of unconditional love, and I would never call Santideva a Christian.
I suppose I think I would define Christianity in the broad, or visible, sense in terms of both doctrine and behaviour. A Christian is one who believes certain propositions (we can roughly summarise those with the Apostles' Creed, I suppose; you might reasonably object to me that the Creed doesn't mention any ethics, but I'd hold that taking the Creed seriously implies some downstream ethical commitments), and then behaves as if those propositions are true. It is necessary to be a Christian to believe that Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God died for the sins of the world and was raised to fullness of life, but to properly or fully be a Christian, that belief must shape and condition your behaviour. And that is what leads the Christian to do things like listen to what Jesus taught and attempt to behave accordingly (cf. John 14:15), or attempt to follow his example (cf. Philippians 2:5), and so on.
So while I certainly agree that patient, radical, self-sacrificing love is something that Christians are called to, I wouldn't say that it suffices as a definition of Christianity.
For what it's worth, on my understanding there are true Christians who are dyed-in-the-wool progressives and who are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. I think that much more important than whether a Christian is progressive/conservative is how that Christian goes about being progressive/conservative. But I tend to think that most prudential political judgements properly belong to the conscience of the individual Christian, though, as with all things in life, they ought to be informed and nourished by a properly Christian moral formation. That is much harder than it sounds, but all of us are fallible works in progress, and I suppose there's no Christian alive who can be confident that their politics perfectly match those of the Kingdom.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Even granting the framing that progressives are anti-Christian and MAGA are bad Christians, I'm not sure where that implies that Christians shouldn't challenge MAGA bad Christianity, attempt to drag it towards better Christianity, or even simply warn Christians against imitating MAGA? Christians can be in a tactical alliance with MAGA while also needing to maintain a sense of why MAGA is bad and they must not become MAGA.
Arguably under those circumstances, it's more important for Christians to clearly articulate criticisms of MAGA. Progressivism is obviously an enemy and there is no temptation to imitate it. But Christians might be tempted to imitate MAGA. So that path must be guarded more fiercely.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.
I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.
As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.
Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.
What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:
So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with. [...] Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?
I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.
So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.
This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?
And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.
If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.
I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Yes, I think you can plausibly argue that wealthy and powerful men fathering many children on a range of mistresses, and then minimally investing in them while also planning to select the most (genetically?) capable of them to pass the family name on to has been common throughout history.
The traditional/conservative/Catholic/Christian line that I imagine First Things would take would be that they are quite aware that their position has not been the norm, because virtue is hard and requires discipline and effort to achieve. The idea would be that traditionalism is a set of norms intended to tame barbarism, as it were, and that what we now see from the right, especially the tech right, is a moral backsliding. They're barbarians; they are the resurgence of a wretched old thing, rather than bold innovators, as they would presumably prefer to see themselves.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Yes, but the problem is that there's only room for one traditional-type worldview, and the one that now fills that niche is dead-set on the destruction of the traditionalist worldview. Narcissism of small differences, and all that.
I'm not quite following - is your suggestion that progressives are the new 'traditional-type worldview'?
Thus you would see traditional conservatives like Schmitz as a declining minority whose only hope of survival rests on finding an accord with other dominant factions, which at the moment include the progressives (who hate the traditionalists), the liberals (who are prepared to live and let live), and I suppose the new right? The libertarians, technologists, transhumanists, and utopians?
I think Schmitz would argue that the libertarian/technologist position is fundamentally unstable, and will collapse back into progressivism if it continues to follow its own (supposedly) nihilistic creed to its logical conclusion.
I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?
For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.
I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.
Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Matthew Schmitz, of conservative Catholic magazine First Things, criticises Elon Musk and the American right over family values
Specifically, he points to a clash between what he regards as an older or more traditional set of family values on the right, heavily influenced by religious conservatism, which emphasises stable marriages and households, care for children and spouses, parents' obligations towards their children and children's duties towards their parents, and so on; and a newer set, which regards parental behaviour as largely unimportant, and instead prioritises genetic predisposition.
He takes Musk as a good test case. Seen from the former perspective, Musk is a despicable father - he has flitted between women and been irresponsible and uninvolved with the raising of his children. Seen from the latter perspective, Musk has perhaps been quite a good father - he has fathered many children while going to deliberate effort to maximise their genetic potential. Should Musk be admired or condemned?
Schmitz is, of course, on the traditionalist side, and he tries to draw a link between Musk's behaviour a kind of libertarian-transhumanist worldview which, he argues, also implicitly endorses positions that Musk repudiates, such as transgenderism, or which the right-wing has traditionally opposed, such as abortion. Naturally he wants a reassertion of the traditional worldview.
Apart from Schmitz's entirely predictable conclusion, though, I think he's correct to identify a tension here. It's no surprise that people like Richard Hanania (who has often protested that he doesn't like conservatives) are in the genetics-first camp, and it's more interesting to note even more 'mainstream' Republicans, like Matt Gaetz, turning towards the genetics-first position. Is there a transformation going on in the right? Are new divides forming around family policy and technology? Or is there some way to square the circle?
Since we just talked about Musk the other day, and since I know the Motte has a large share of what I would consider libertarian(ish) genetics-first or heredity-first posters, it'd be interesting to hear some comments!
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Sure, I've wanted bad things to be true about my opponents, though at my best I try to follow Lewis' advice. But I hope that I, and more importantly, I hope that most public figures would have enough presence of mind to not publicly endorse obviously false theories to that effect.
I don't disagree with you about the media being awful. I agree that they're agenda-driven and will put anything involving Elon Musk in the worst light possible. It's just that in this case I tend to agree with Hanania that Musk has been getting worse, and I suppose I find Hanania more credible for that judgement given that Hanania and Unherd are not mainstream media outlets, but are both part of the wider 'dissident' sphere that might otherwise be sympathetic to the right.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.
Fortunately SMBC made a comic about this too.
Not AI, of course, but if you are able to reliably predict the outcome of a conflict, you can just skip the conflict itself and go straight to the settlement.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path?
The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.
Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
If this is what you think everybody does, then... well, I question how many people you've been interacting with. Most people, I notice, seem to be able to not spend hours every day tweeting nonsense. Most people did not respond to the Paul Pelosi story with "LOL, I wish that were true, it'd be hilarious!", even if you hold that Musk was joking, which he does not appear to have been doing anyway.
No, most people are not like Elon Musk in this regard, and I find this an odd defense considering that you just said that Musk "doesn't operate like normal people". Which is it? Even in this post you accuse the media of "weaponising mental illness" - is Musk mentally ill? Is that your position? Is his behaviour normal or not?
But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal.
If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.
Another way of putting it would be that Schmitz and company care about what fatherhood does to the father, as well as to the children.
A Motte poster defended Musk to me on the basis of outcomes for the children - "the goal is to raise the next generation of adults", and insofar as Musk has provided them with sufficient material abundance and with sufficient mentoring, he has discharged his duty and everything is all right, from a traditional perspective.
My reply to this was snarky, but I think substantially correct. From the traditionalist perspective, you do not only take into account the results for the child (they will argue about the child's welfare, but as you say, that's at least partially ablative), but also the results for the father. Fatherhood is meant to be morally forming, even educative, for the father as well as the child. The discipline of raising a child well should make you into a better, wiser human being.
Your mention of "perpetual boyhood" is a good way of putting it. Musk is a failure of masculinity because he's avoiding growing up, becoming responsible, disciplining himself, and so on. He is failing to learn the proper lessons of fatherhood. No amount of material provision for children can compensate for that.
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